wee Cria

This is and adorable sweater with just a hint of twee. I went with some colorful, fun buttons to contrast with the natural cotton and silver garter stitch, and I think they make the project pop, like fancy icing on an adorable little cupcake.

The pattern is a fun, smartly designed sweater with no seaming and very intriguing construction. In spite of being a simple looking little sweater this design is fun to knit – all without being too challenging*

I do want to revisit the SilverSpun cotton yarn I reviewed last month. Now that I’ve finished the design I specifically wanted to address the issue of shrinkage. The good folks at SilverSpun are very up front about the fact that cotton shrinks. And if you know anything about fibers (or wear cotton clothing at all) you shouldn’t really be surprised. But it does take a few adjustments.

They recommend swatching before you begin knitting, and washing your swatch as you plan to wash your final garment. This is 100% the right answer and the correct thing to do.

It’s also NOT what I did. But then I like to live dangerously. (Hey, if I ruin a sweater, it’s still good blog content, right?) I swatched and was getting slightly fewer stitches to the inch then the gauge recommended. I figured that would help with the shrinkage. But since cotton shrinks more in length than width I also took the precaution of knitting the “knit even” parts of this pattern for a couple of extra rows.

The finished baby sweater before blocking measured 8.5 inches from shoulder to hem and 9.5 inches across at the bottom hem (so 19″ circumference, I’m just measuring straight across because I’m lazy). Now I plan on giving this adorable tiny baby sweater to the mom of an impending adorable tiny human. And new moms aren’t really interested in hand-wash garments. So I figured I’d better put this sweater through the wringer. Well, not literally, because no one uses those for washing clothes anymore. But I did put it through the washing machine and dryer using my normal laundry settings. Once out it was pretty crumpled so I did a gentle steam blocking** to help it lay flat. After all that it measures 7.5 inches from shoulder to hem and 8.5 inches across.

So yeah, it shrinks. But it’s shrinking very predictably. And the yarn is still very stretchy, I have no doubt that it’d make lovely socks. They wouldn’t get lazy and slouchy at all. And if you knit them just a touch long that would account for any actual shrinkage. If that seems like a lot of planning keep in mind I could name 2 or 3 superwash wool sock yarns with the same problem…

*If I want a challenge I’ll start one of the bajillions of designs I want to actually knit someday…
**in other words, I ironed it folded between two towels. Cotton does like being ironed!